With the ever rising costs of heating and the increasing emphasis on conservation of natural resources, there is a continued need to provide improved building materials for insulating edifices. Such building materials should be inexpensive to manufacture and easy to install. The building materials should also provide additional beneficial and desirable characteristics such as non-abrasiveness, softness, hydrophilicity, hydrophobicity, breathability, opacity, ultraviolet reflectivity, heat reflectivity, and/or toughness.